City of Silver

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “No, cholo, bastard, she is not. I will kill you as well as her if you let her get out of this house.”

  They searched the rooms again and did not find her. Morada questioned the servants. Her maid had helped her dress after siesta. That was the last anyone in the house had seen her. Evalin, the cook, was also gone. The convent, Morada thought. Perhaps Gemita had fled there as her sister had. No, she would not have gone there. If she was clever enough to take the documents, Inez must have told her about them. He had killed Inez within the convent walls. Not even Gemita was stupid enough to then seek refuge there. Her only friend was that silly daughter of Tovar. A chill of fear, almost unknown in his life, hit the scalp of Francisco Rojas de la Morada. If his papers fell into the hands of the Basques, he would never be able to buy them back. They would go straight to Nestares. His own supporters would abandon him and throw themselves on the mercy of the Viceroy and the King. He would die in ignominy.

  He ordered the captain of his guard to arm his men. Morada strode to the hall and strapped on his own breastplate and took his helmet.

  The clock in the tower was striking nine as he and his guard reached the street. If Gemita had left the house after siesta, she would not have found Tovar at home. He would have already gone to the banquet the Basques were hosting for Nestares. The Tovar women would do nothing alone. Gemita and the letters would still be sitting in the Basque’s house, waiting for him to return. Tovar would be away for hours yet. Still, with all the Indians in the ingenio and perhaps that Mestizo bastard Barco, twelve men would not be enough to storm the house. Certainly if the letters had gotten farther, he would need a sizable band of men. The Alcalde could not call on the other members of the Cabildo. His honor would not allow him to reveal his daughter’s betrayal. Nor could he let them know he had allowed the papers to get out of his possession. Yet he needed fighters he could trust.

  At that moment when, on the other side of the city, Nestares, in the company of many but not all of the Basque miners, was being served a sweet made with vanilla by a beautiful black slave from the Cape Verde islands, the Alcalde set out quickly to recruit men of force.

  It was a simple matter to amass a fierce gang in Potosí. Adventurers who reached the city without a penny expected to become wealthy gentlemen overnight. None did. They could be found easily and bought for a price.

  At the bowling court opposite the Jesuit church, where the brawlers always gathered, the Alcalde found seven men, among them Estéfano Curzio, a fearsome Italian who had clashed with and killed five Basques in a rancorous chain of vengeance over the death of a Neapolitan noble youth.

  At a billiards parlor, he found six who had been known to kill Biscayans when armed with nothing more than a wooden cue.

  He quickly completed his army with the Empedradillo gang, minor traders in illicit goods by day and by night brawlers who could be found on the eastern side of the Plaza del Regocijo, taunting and challenging every armed male who attempted to pass. They were always ready to riot and gleefully joined the Alcalde’s ragtag squadron. “Come out with me. We are going to hunt partridges,” was all he had to say.

  Avoiding the center, where the fiesta wore on, Morada led his small army along the almost deserted Calle de la Paz toward the Ingenio Tovar.

  PADRE JUNIPERO STUMBLED out of the Tambo Lo Caliente. Stunned as he was by the actor’s revelations, terrified and confused by his need to act quickly and his despair of succeeding, he did not have to work very hard to act drunk. His body lurched along, and he was soon caught up between two groups of reveling miners. The city was lit for a mascarada nocturna. Torches burned on the buildings.

  Where could he go for help? Except for the nuns in the convent and the Alcalde, his friends in the city had always been among the downtrodden. Indians were not permitted to carry swords or firearms. Without authority or force, with the Inquisition searching for him and Téllez and Taboada trying to murder him, how could he wrest from Morada, the most powerful man in the city, the evidence to save the Abbess?

  The throng about him, costumed in rich French tissues, precious serges, and gorgeously colored brocades, made its way toward the Plaza Mayor. The sight of a handsome young Mestizo decked out in purple satin and sky blue silk brought the priest back from the edge of despair. Barco! The evidence was in the Casa de la Morada. Barco could gain access through his mother.

  Against the tide of revelers going toward the cathedral square, a lone figure, heavily cloaked, his black felt hat askew, obscuring his face, took the opposite route, uphill toward the Ingenio Tovar and Barco.

  AT THE INGENIO that was the objective of so many desperate men, three women gathered up the letters from the floor and refolded them carefully. A cup of maté had calmed Gemita.

  Pilar took the papers, arranged them neatly, and tied them with one of Beatriz’s ribbons, holding them gingerly, feeling they could burn her if she grasped them.

  Beatriz, fists clenched at her sides, paced before the windows. “We will take this information to the Visitador. With it we can save the Abbess.”

  Her mother’s trembling hands went to her cheeks. “We cannot do such a thing. We are just women.”

  “We must,” Beatriz declared in that New World way of hers.

  “How do we even know how to find Nestares?” Pilar said. Her daughter’s courage shamed her, but she knew nothing of how to act on her own in such circumstances.

  “You are wrong, Beatriz,” Gemita put in. “It is the Inquisition that took the Abbess, not the Visitador. So we should give the letters to the Grand Inquisitor.”

  Beatriz’s mouth opened and closed again.

  Pilar went to her daughter and smoothed her hair. “We need help. We do not know how to proceed. Besides, it would be dangerous for us to charge into the center alone and unprotected, especially with the drunken revelers there.” Her mind raced over the possibilities, but her heart had already decided. “I will go to the mine and get the Captain. He will take the letters to the proper authorities.” Though her own nerves seared at the idea of going out alone, she feared even more that Beatriz would charge out the door herself. Better for the mother to be endangered than the child.

  Admiration shone in the girl’s eyes.

  “I will go with you,” she declared.

  Gemita whimpered.

  “No,” Pilar said, and seeing her daughter’s need, gave Beatriz her own heroic role, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a mother to say to her daughter. “The papers must be kept safe. We cannot take them with us and expose them to theft. You must stay here and guard them while I go to get your father.” Pilar prayed the girl would accept the idea, meant only to protect her.

  “I will,” Beatriz said. “I will keep a sword at my side. Domingo taught me to use one when I was just a child.” She leapt to the door. “I will saddle your horse, Mother.”

  Gemita helped Pilar out of her high-heeled shoes, corset, and exaggerated hoop skirt. She put on a riding habit she had not worn in years and blessed the altitude of Potosí that kept matrons like her as slender as girls. At the last moment, she took one of Antonio’s vicuña cloaks and swung it about her.

  Beatriz was waiting in the yard with the horse. Pilar mounted and waited while the girls lifted the plank that barred the gate.

  “Barricade yourselves in and open for no one but the Captain and myself.”

  “Go with God, Mother,” Beatriz called.

  Pilar blessed herself and urged the horse out into the deserted street and uphill, away from the center, in the direction of the mine. She heard the gate shut behind her. The girls would be safe behind the stout stone walls of the ingenio, she told herself.

  In the clear Andean night, even with the light of the Easter moon, she could barely make her way. She had never ridden out at night in her life. Her pulse beat with fear and excitement. Fortunately, the road was smooth and easy to follow. It led her toward a place she had gone to only once a year—for the ceremony of the blessing—when the Bishop
prayed for the mine and the miners and seemed to be praying for wealth, the way the priests at home in Spain prayed for a good harvest.

  The maids said the Indians had their own ceremony, that they sacrificed a llama and sprinkled its blood at the mine’s entrance to evict evil spirits and ask their gods for a rich vein of silver. Santiago Yana had died there. Rosa said her husband was murdered because of a packet of papers. “Oh, Dios mío!” The words were either an oath or a prayer. Pilar did not know which.

  She murmured prayers and kicked the poor beast beneath her, urging it go faster and faster until its great flanks heaved with its effort to breathe in the thin, nearly absent air.

  Twenty-one

  BEATRIZ SUPPRESSED A laugh. “Not that one,” she said. “That’s just for ceremonies. It wouldn’t cut butter.”

  Gemita put the sword with the jewel-encrusted hilt back into the cabinet. “I know that. I just wanted to see if you did.”

  Beatriz took her father’s best German saber for herself and handed Gemita a light fencing sword. Certainly they would never have to fight. Surely her father and Domingo would return in time to protect her. Still, she took a perverse pleasure in pretending to Gemita that they would have to defend the house as the Cid might defend a castle. They went up to the second floor, to the balcony overlooking the interior patio. “We’ll wait here, where we can see them if they enter and have the advantage of them if they try to come up the stairs.”

  “Maybe we should go out into the ingenio yard to hide among the Indians.” Gemita was holding her sword limply, as if it were a flower or a feather.

  “The Indians are all gone to the mine—men and women, whoever was here—to help with the rescue.”

  Gemita’s eyes filled with tears. “Then we really are alone. Totally alone.”

  Beatriz gripped her sword more tightly. “Don’t worry. My bro—My father’s mayordomo taught me to fight when I was a girl.”

  “But—”

  “Shh.” Beatriz put her fingers to Gemita’s lips. “I heard something out in the street.”

  They crept through the sitting room to the balcony that overlooked the side street. As quietly as she could, Beatriz went out on hands and knees. She rose slowly and peered over the balustrade. Down in the flickering light of the torches, she saw only a lone, drunken Mestizo, wrapped in a big cape, his black hat askew, staggering toward the corner. She put a hand on Gemita’s shoulder. “It’s no one,” she said, and went back inside.

  PADRE JUNIPERO ROUNDED the corner, lurched along the ingenio wall, and approached the front entrance of the Casa Tovar. Spiraling bands gave the columns on either side of the door a twisted appearance that seemed to writhe in the flickering torchlight. The place was ghostly quiet. The priest glanced up and down the street and saw no one. He was about to ring the bell when whispering voices froze him in his tracks. He backed into the shadows, sweating despite the cold wind.

  Down the Calle Cortez, at the end of the street, at least two dozen men were approaching. As they drew closer, the priest saw the Alcalde and his guard and a crowd of motley thugs. Two of them carried the long, thick trunk of a kehuiña tree—the kind of log the town burned in the bonfires in the plazas.

  The priest drew breath to call out and raise an alarm in the house, but an iron hand from nowhere covered his mouth. His assailant clamped a burly arm around him and held him fast. Junipero struggled uselessly and watched, helpless, as men came from the rear of the Alcalde’s squadron and, after raising two ladders against the low wall of the outer patio, quickly gained entry and opened the postern to let in the others. They were as quiet as nuns in a cloister.

  The priest banged his elbows against the hard body that held him. The man smelled of acrid sweat and chicha.

  New whispers from behind distracted his attacker, who spun them both around to see a small band of noble youths carrying guitars and dressed in capes decorated with ribbons, of the kind young men wore to serenade beneath a lady’s balcony. The priest grasped the forearms of his attacker and jerked his own body forward, lifting the man off his feet, and fell forward, crashing them both to the ground. He slipped sideways to elude his attacker’s lunge, threw off his hat and cape, and showed himself.

  “Help!” he called.

  “Priest!” the thug spat out as he rose.

  Junipero kicked the man’s face with all his might and ran for the serenaders. “In the name of Santiago, help me!”

  The thug followed, but two of the young men tripped him and held him down.

  “You must help me defend this house, which is under attack,” the priest implored.

  “How can we, Padre?” said a tall man a little older than the others, a stranger to the priest. He held up a guitar. “We have come armed only with our music.”

  THE DRUNK OUT in the street shouted, but before Beatriz could go and have another look, an explosion so loud and sudden that it made her scream came from the outer patio. The sword Gemita was holding clattered to the floor. With the second crash, Beatriz knew. “They are inside the outer wall. They are battering the door of the high inner wall.” The crashes came one after the other, and in between, the sounds of men shouting. Still gripping her saber, Beatriz picked up the fencing sword and handed it again to Gemita. “We will have to fight.” This has to be fantasy, she thought.

  Gemita began to wail. “We cannot. I cannot. How can we fight?”

  “The Abbess will die if we do not. We will die.” They would die anyway.

  The crashing continued. The right-hand door began to move.

  “Hide. We have to hide behind the bed curtains.” Gemita’s voice was now three octaves higher than her normal squeak.

  “They will find us.”

  A huge crash, and the door began to splinter. Gemita dropped her sword again.

  “Go,” Beatriz commanded. “Get the packet of letters and go to the balcony of the sitting room.”

  The door cracked with a huge explosion of wood on wood.

  “Now!” Beatriz screamed. She shoved Gemita in the direction of her room. “Bring that long green silk ribbon. Go. Go!”

  She picked up Gemita’s sword and stood with the saber in one hand and the sword in the other. Her heart and stomach and knees all trembled with each thud. A huge log crashed through the door, and a gauntleted hand reached in. Men came in, wearing armor and helmets bearing the red plume of the Alcalde’s guard.

  Gemita came screaming down the hall and into the sitting room, trailing the ribbon.

  “Up there!” a man shouted from the patio. More men were pouring through the door. Panting, Beatriz waited until the first two were at the bottom of the steps, and then, still holding the swords, with the heels of her hands she launched her mother’s stone planters off the balustrade directly on them. They howled.

  Without looking to see the damage she had done, she ran into the sitting room and slammed and bolted the door. “Quickly, move the furniture over here.” She put down the swords and with Gemita piled five heavy chairs in front of the door.

  “To the balcony.”

  Gemita opened the French door. Beatriz took the packet of letters and strapped them to her body with the ribbon. She took up the swords again as something slammed against the corridor door. “Out.”

  She followed Gemita onto the balcony. “Jump!” she commanded.

  Gemita screamed. “There are men down there.”

  Beatriz gasped. “Oh, Dios.” The oath slipped out.

  “Jump, Gemita. We will catch you.” It was Padre Junipero’s voice.

  “Thank you, God,” Beatriz whispered. Facing the door, a sword in each hand, she glanced back over the balustrade and saw four men holding a cape. Gemita climbed up but hesitated. Beatriz shoved her off. Inside the sitting room, the door was opening.

  Beatriz clambered up to the balustrade, still gripping the swords.

  “Throw me the weapons,” called a tall man standing to the side, next to the priest.

  She dropped the saber.

&n
bsp; The man leapt aside, covering his head. “Hilt first!” he screamed.

  She let the other one go.

  The men at the sitting room door crashed through and spilled onto the floor. Beatriz leapt. The hem of her broad skirt caught on something and she found herself upside down, dangling over the open cape. She yanked at the skirt, but it would not come free. Morada’s men were on the balcony, grabbing for her. She swung herself away and kicked at their hands. The cloth began to rip at last. She swung harder and slowly, with the ripping of her skirt, fell into the cape. A man above her had climbed onto the balustrade of the balcony and was about to leap into the street.

  “Leave the swords and take the girls away from danger,” Padre Junipero called to the tall man, who tossed the swords to the others, grabbed Gemita and Beatriz by their hands, and ran down the Calle de la Paz in the direction of the Ribera.

  Shouts and clanging of steel echoed behind them. They ran and ran until they reached the Bridge of San Sebastián. Gemita was out of breath and stumbling. The man stopped. “Rest a moment.” He put his hand in his doublet and drew out a handkerchief and gave it to Gemita.

  Beatriz shivered in the wind that whistled down the narrow streets. The man took off his beautiful cloak of double taffeta and wrapped it around both girls. Footsteps pounded on the stones in the dark street behind them. “Come,” he said, “we must run.”

  In the middle of the bridge, a criminal’s head had been left on a pike as a warning to others. Gemita looked up at it and began to scream uncontrollably and would not walk past it. Beatriz threw the cloak over her head and dragged her.

  A pursuer charged them from behind. Their protector, whoever he was, feinted to avoid the slash of the guardsman’s sword and with a lithe and graceful gesture, like the step of a courtly dance, tripped him and pounced on him. The two men rolled over. The assailant’s weapon threatened their unarmed protector’s throat. Beatriz slipped out from under the cape and charged, kicking at the side of the attacker’s head with the sharp heel of her shoe. He groaned, and their protector got the better of him. In seconds, the guardsman was over the side of the bridge and in the water. The tall man had the sword.